After sleeping in past sunrise, we clean up the house, load up the car, and depart from Westmore in the early morning. It’s another cloud-strewn day - this time, banks of middle clouds are rolling in from the valleys to the west, making for excellent fall foliage shooting conditions. Past the village of Barton, we head west along Barton Hill Road toward Irasburg, stopping the car every few hundred yards to gawk at the colors, the landscape spangled by shadow and sunlight, and the morning mist rolling over the treetops. I take a number of favourite shots along this road: a tunnel of golden oaks lining the path, and a distant shot of a working farm, with valley fog and looming mountains beyond, to the west.
In Irasburg, Jane looks in vain for a public restroom (third-trimester bladder is no joke) while I shoot the village’s congregational church from the nearby green. We turn south now on the road to Peacham and Caledonia County, stopping at a gas station for Jane before continuing toward Craftsbury Common. Before Craftsbury, we turn off on a side road, stopping along the way to photograph distant hills and farmlands, admiring majestic maples, oaks, and elms emblazoned with color. The opportunities for creativity and composition are endless after leaving the main road; meandering along farm roads and through less-frequented hamlets, you catch a sense of the slower, more intentional life that the pastoral landscape almost seems to encourage no matter where you turn. It is this sort of beautiful autumn morning that makes the Northeast Kingdom so special - even, one gathers, for the local Vermonters.
At Craftsbury Common, we take a brief break and photograph the beautiful trees behind the village’s public library before continuing southward, past Hardwick and along a vanishingly narrow dirt road to a trailhead just past Nichols Pond. Here, we take a brief, slightly steep climb (Jane climbing carefully and steadily, at 30 weeks) through the autumn forest to Nichols Ledge, which looks out over an impressive westward vista across Nichols Pond and East Long Pond, the lakes tucked admist a sea of fall foliage at its peak. I take two timelapses here while Jane rests and munches on some snacks. It’s past noon now; a light drizzle moves in as we climb back down the mountainside and through the forest.
Back on the road, we head east toward Cabot and finally rejoin our route from last year (when we visited the Foster Covered Bridge and bought apple cider donuts at Burt’s Orchard before heading into Groton State Forest). Jane takes another bathroom break in the Cabot General Store, while I walk around the village green but find little to photograph. Further south, we pass through the town of Marshfield, turning off onto an old railroad bed-turned dirt road toward Turtlehead Pond. The western end of the pond has impressive near, medium, and far views of the foliage in the Marshfield Town Forest, tucked beneath granite cliffs; after scouting for a bit, we resolve to return early the next morning for sunrise. Back on the road, we head east to Groton State Forest, stopping first at Peacham Pond. The pond itself has fairly standard views as far as lakeside scenery goes, but we stop to photograph our trusty Corolla beneath the panoply of colorful trees that line the access road.
Heading further south, we pass through Groton State Forest and onward to our next pondside stop. After we mistakenly try the entrance to the Ricker Pond Campground, the campsite attendant directs us another mile or so south to a parking lot where we can access the old railroad bed (now walking/biking trail) at the pond’s southern end. We scout around here a bit, walking out onto a tiny peninsula that juts out into the pond (where we’ll come back tomorrow for a mini-maternity shoot of sorts), and also photographing the foliage and small falls at the pond’s nearby outlet. Back in the car, we head south to Rt 302 and turn north along Minard Hill Road, which will finally lead us to our long-awaited reunion with the village of Peacham.
We enter the Peacham-Barnet area in the mid-afternoon. A morning of enticing light and changeable weather has only looked more and more promising as the day has worn on. By the time we find our first shooting location (a cemetery near West Barnet), I could not possibly ask for better conditions for shooting autumn scenery: the clouds provide just enough coverto act as a soft lightbox for the colorful landscapes, but are moving swiftly enough to produce beautiful, active light rays that highlight different features of the land. After setting up another timelapse here, I walk along the cemetery and up and down the dirt road, shooting in just about every direction. Next, we turn the car back down the hill toward Peacham, and turn off along the hills to the north to explore a trio of shooting locations I’ve scouted around the vicinity of East Peacham. My homework has proven fruitful; from this height of land, we’re able to see down the valley and toward the rolling farmlands and hillsides that surround Peacham; to our south, I can see the white steepletop of Peacham’s iconic church. I file these locations away for sunrise on our final day, before proceeding back to the old fire station above the church, where Jane and I first stopped one year ago (nearly to the day). We walk along the nearby hill behind the fire station, stopping to photograph the church and farm from under the boughs of an apple tree.
It is nearly the golden hour now; as a touring photography group moves in to shoot the church, we leave and head across the street to Peacham’s beautiful cemetery, where we are alone until the sunset. Here, I revisit a beautiful, massive maple tree towering above the headstones - quite possibly the most beautiful maple tree I have ever photographed in my life (but not the most beautiful tree - that honor goes to the Great Beech standing above the Susquehanna River in Maryland). Behind the cemetery, the hillside opens up to an impressive southward vista, taking in hamlets and hillsides, trees coated in the honeyglow of the setting sun. I set up the day’s final timelapse here - a long one - while we sit on the grass among the gravestones, observing and photographing the changing light. Perhaps it’s the setting, but Jane and I get a little nostalgic here, talking about our childhoods, our travels, the meaning of our work, the meaning of our traveling to and being in a place as beautiful as this one, and how all of it will change (yet again, but perhaps more than ever before) in the space of the next few months. As the sun sets behind the hills in the forest to our west, we walk back through the cemetery to our car. We make the short drive north along the Peacham-Danville Road, and after a very long day of driving, exploring, and shooting, we settle in for the night in a guesthouse along Joe’s Brook, just south of Danville.
